Who Am I - Kein System ist sicher (2014)

When I put this movie on, I had high expectations, however, for me, this film was a German equivalent of a low budget Hollywood movie, where the little money available was squandered on a special effects title sequence, and little effort was placed into writing a compelling story.

If you've seen the first season of the series Mr. Robot, then you've already seen a very similar storyline, only done many times better. The difference here is that so many plot twists arise at the end that you just don't know what to do with them all.

The film constantly dips its toes into the cheesy waters of washed up humor and thriller climaxes. At some point you're just laughing at how cheesy it is.

Me being an English speaker reading the sometimes illegible English subtitles (come on guys, get someone to take another look at them!), I found it extremely difficult to follow the dialogue on the train scenes (which was the only truly creative environment made for this movie), and I think this is the fault of the sound engineer / designer. The soundtrack is also quite poor, jumping sporadically between cinematic sci-fi arpeggiators and tech / tech-house party scenes, both lacking in creativity.

I find it great that directors are looking for topics about the deep web and underground hacker scene, but I think we've seen enough psycho-thriller hacking movies to know that what we need in a hacker movie is a character who's strong with a meaningful purpose whose story is truly compelling. Enough with the personality and psychological disorders, bring a fresh character who knows saving the world isn't what he/she is really doing.

The bottom line is: I wanted to like this movie because the theme interests me greatly, but I didn't really, mostly because of déjà vu, but also because of the overall weakness of dialogue, soundtrack, and characters.

I gave the movie a 4 because it did managed to get some chuckles out of us, but it was a general consensus with friends that this was not a good movie.